SRI's neural-net group retooled toward symbolic AI around 1965–66, years before Minsky and Papert's Perceptrons was published in 1969 — the social closure predates the formal refutation

dreyfusconnectionismsriai-winterperceptronsminskychronologyhistory-of-mlsociology-of-science

The chronology sharpens the vault's "social closure, not refutation" reading of connectionism's mid-1960s eclipse: SRI's decision to leave neural networks for symbolic AI predates the publication of the formal refutation usually credited with ending the program. Mikel Olazaran's interviews place the SRI group's retooling at "about 1965 or 1966" (Nilsson), effected concretely by hiring Marvin Minsky's former student Bertram Raphael to teach the group LISP. Minsky's own retrospective, in the same chapter, agrees on the timing while reading it as a scientific verdict:

"They hired Raphael, one of my students. They started to use LISP, and they became one of the great centres of heuristic programming. They got the 'Shakey' robot, and things like that. By that time the perceptron project was really dead."

But the Perceptrons book Minsky and Papert wrote was not published until 1969. Dreyfus's own 1988 paper independently dates its circulation to the same moment as SRI's pivot: "About 1965, Minsky and Papert... began circulating drafts of a book attacking the idea of the perceptron." So SRI's retooling coincides with the circulation of an unpublished draft, years before any formal, citable refutation existed in print. Richard Duda's interview adds that Minsky had already been "a consultant" to SRI before the Raphael hire — meaning the pull toward symbolic AI ran through a pre-existing personal and institutional relationship, not through engagement with a finished argument.

This is a dated, concrete instance of the general gap Dreyfus's paper insists on: the record shows funding and reputation moving before, and independent of, any completed scientific refutation. It supplies the timeline beneath claim-sri-neural-group-retooled-for-arpa-funding and observation-dreyfus-olazaran-converge-connectionism-eclipse-was-social, and it constrains myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism from the chronology side: a book published in 1969 cannot be the cause of a group's 1965–66 exit. The vault separately reads the book's central negative result as a conjecture rather than a proof (claim-perceptrons-multilayer-sterile-was-conjecture). See moc-backpropagation-origins.